Jeremy Hunt's childcare plan risks letting down mums who want to work - and mums who don't

For all the clinked glasses of congratulation on the day of a Budget, there's often a heavy hangover when the cheers die down and the fine print gets exposed.

And, after the initial welcome given to Jeremy Hunt's £4bn plan for childcare, it didn't take long before gaping holes appeared in his promise to provide free help for working parents of under-fives.

Childcare providers and others warned that the plan lacked the funding needed to make it work, schools worried that their own budgets would be raided to provide "wraparound" care and the Institute for Fiscal Studies said only a sixth of the new places would be for mothers entering the workforce.

Another key flaw is that the new policy doesn't apply to those in apprenticeships or training, including nurses and midwives. Moreover, there were no new measures to ensure there is an adequate, trained workforce to deliver the planned increase in places for everyone else.

Ministers seem to be assuming that an increase in the staff-to-child ratio from 1:4 to 1:5 for England will magically allow them to deliver the new places without much increase in staffing. Yet that may face obstacles from parents who worry that will dilute the care their child gets.

I vividly recall turning up to our first son's ruinously expensive nursery one day to find there were suddenly lots more new staff giving every child plenty of attention. When a young staffer confessed that it was because Ofsted were there for an inspection, I realised the sleight of hand being deployed and swiftly placed him with a childminder instead.

There are pros and cons to each type of childcare. For our kids, we found that childminders were better for the under-threes for that one on one focus, but once they got older nurseries provided better socialisation and early education. Other parents will have different experiences and views.

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And ultimately childcare policy ought to be about choice. The good news is that Early Years minister Claire Coutinho recognises this, telling i this week "this is about parental choice". Yet in childcare - as in childbirth itself - choice is just a slogan unless it is adequately funded and properly informed.

The crippling fees in the UK are so high that 76 per cent of mothers who pay for childcare say it no longer makes financial sense for them to work. An estimated 1.7 million women are prevented from taking on more hours of paid work due to childcare issues, resulting in up to £28.2bn economic output lost every year.

Yet, as Tory MP George Eustice was brave enough to point out this week, that's not the whole story. A major survey of 5,057 parents conducted by the Department for Education in 2019 found that almost two thirds (65 per cent) of mothers with children aged four and under would rather work fewer hours so they could spend more time looking after their children.

The think tank Civitas calculated last year that there are likely to be more than two million working mothers of pre-school children who actively want to reduce the number of hours they work, if "they could afford it".

For decades, there was a steady drop in the number of "stay-at-home mums" who don't work, but in recent years that's gone into reverse. In 2022, 43,000 women dropped out of the workforce to look after family, a three per cent increase on the previous year.

Some of that will be due to high childcare costs, some of it is due to mothers taking stock during the pandemic. Like the over-50s who gave up work in big numbers, some concluded that their personal wellbeing and contact with loved ones was more important than pounds and pence.

There has also been a growing number of women who take longer maternity leave these days than their working mothers ever did, with a six months or a year more popular than three months. That's due to better statutory leave, shared parental leave, and employers having to meet the demands of staff.

Eustice was right that one of the several flaws in Hunt's announcement was the lack of any support for those parents who simply prefer to look after their young children than go to work.

Some Tory MPs wanted to see the radical policy of front-loaded child benefit payments, with parents receiving more money in the first few years of a child's life and less later on, to help ease the financial pressures on those who stay-at-home.

Those who stay at home out of choice point out the demands of looking after children means they are every inch as much a "working mother" as others who commute to their day job. Yet, like carers of elderly relatives, their work often goes unrecognised at best and ridiculed at worst.

In its excellent manifesto, the charity Pregnant Then Screwed rightly calls for a world where women are not judged for the contents of their womb, or the hours they work, but for their skills and talents.

"We believe in a world where stay-at-home parents are valued for their contribution to society. We believe in a world where both parents are encouraged to spend time with their children. We believe in a world where childcare is free and is the best it can possibly be for all children." That's not a bad prescription for ministers to follow.

A big missing piece of the jigsaw is also the lack of legislation on the right to flexible working. Boris Johnson promised draft employment laws to enact flexibility, but like many of his promises it vanished into thin air. One study has found that 86 per cent of mothers who try to work flexibly face discrimination as a result.

A YouGov poll last year found that flexibility was as important as salary to mothers, and second only to pay for fathers looking for new jobs. With more than half of UK working parents saying they would consider leaving their job for a more flexible role, both bosses and ministers need to listen to that demand.

Although the Chancellor got his photo-call with cute toddlers on Budget day, we are still a long way from a coherent childcare policy for those who want to go to work and those who don't. It won't be child's play getting there, but all the political parties need to make parental choice a priority - and a reality.